MicroBooNE

MicroBooNE is in Pittsburgh!

We're at University of Pittsburgh this week for our collaboration meeting. We had a fascinating visit to the Allegheny Observatory, which, as well as some impressive telescopes, is home to a sweetgum tree grown from seeds that orbited the moon on Artemis I.

Newly published in Physical Review D, a search for particles—scalar bosons—that could indicate a portal, via the Higgs term, from the Standard Model to a dark sector. These scalar bosons would be produced in the NuMI beam and travel to the MicroBooNE detector where they would decay into electron-positron pairs. These kinds of searches for new sectors of dark-matter candidates are a key part of the physics programme of short-baseline neutrino experiments.

Read the paper here: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/6myb-c3g1

A new MicroBooNE paper just released on the arXiv. This is a comprehensive review of MicroBooNE’s light simulation, the light-based triggering scheme, and the stability of the light response and photomultiplier gain calibration over five years of running. This is an important summary of how the scintillation in a liquid-argon detector evolves over an extended period of time. Take a look at https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23691